Dagoba's Rosemary Mint bar was one of Marisa's standout picks for our Fancy Food Show Favorites, and I've since become slavishly devoted to their Seeds bar. It's 68% cacao, studded throughout with pumpkin, hemp and sunflower seeds, and now I've got even greater impetus to dig it, because the company is giving away free seeds via their website Seed the Day.

"Whether it's a pot on the windowsill, a patch in the backyard or a big community effort, everyone can garden. We'll get you ready for spring and help keep your garden blooming by sending you the very herbs and flowers found in our chocolate bars. Everyone who signs up will get at least one packet of lavender, mint, rosemary, pumpkin or sunflower seeds."

So far as I can tell, there's not a single hitch or string -- just free seeds and an extra excuse to think of chocolate. The site also notes that should your planting group be planning a late night planting romp, they just might send along some delicious provisions. And - if you live in Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, you can come on out and nab a handful for yourself. Dates are listed here.


Seed the Day

Many of the plants I read about and see can be used for tea. Some must be dried first, and some can be used dried or fresh. I would like to start with the most common ones first. These plants can be found almost anywhere. I found these three growing in my yard upstate.

While mowing the lawn Sunday, I smelled the familiar spicy-minty smell of ground ivy, also known as gill-over-the-ground, creeping charlie, catsfoot, and several other localized nicknames. Ground ivy is a small ground cover that frequently runs amok at the edges of lawns and around buildings. It has fan-shaped, toothed, opposed leaves, and produces small funnel-shaped blue to violet flowers. It grows with runners, and will appear like many small vines tangled in the other weeds that grow at the edges of landscaped areas.

Crushing and smelling the leaves will confirm that you have ground ivy. It has a distinctively mint-like odor. Tea from ground ivy should be made from dried leaves. I did some research on the uses for ground ivy tea. The medicinal uses are extensive.

Back when I first wrote about cattails, I promised a return to the subject soon for something I described as cattails on the cob. Allow me to explain this delicacy to you. In the late spring, if you watch cattail plants, you will notice that the well known sausage-like fruits of the cattail plant start to mature inside of the central leaves. Look at the leaves for a swelling and pull them out of the plant. If you slowly peel the husks away, you will find the two parts of the cattail flower inside. The upper, or male part of the flower is what we're after. These green spikes will bloom and produce pollen once they emerge from the husk which makes the season very short. If you find too many already blooming, don't fret, because the pollen is another of the offerings of this amazing plant.

Amy, Alec, and I journeyed Saturday once again to The Great Vly Swamp, in West Camp, New York. While Amy and Alec sought after dragonflies and birds to photograph, I started checking the cattails. I had just caught the season at the tail end, as many of the flowers were covered with pollen, and some of the sausage-like seed heads had already started to form. Even this late in the season, I still managed to harvest enough of the flower spikes to make an interesting side dish. Before we left the swamp, I grabbed a clean bag and collected some pollen by carefully bending the stem of the pollen covered flower into the bag and hitting the stem a couple of times. I managed to get about half a cup, but could have collected a lot more.

A quick look around before leaving gave me some other reasons to return to the swamp at a later date. Pickerelweed which will produce a nutty snack food in the early fall, and arrowheads, which produce a good wild potato substitute.

This past weekend I took two good long walks. The first was along the Hackensack River, on a nice flat trail at Mill Creek Park in Secaucus NJ, and a second walk in Little Ferry, NJ in Losen Slote Park. Amy and Alec were away for the weekend, so please excuse my feeble attempts at photography.

Mill Creek did not have too much to offer that day, but is a great walk if you enjoy birdwatching. I did find these mulberries pictured here though. Mulberry trees in our area come in two varieties. Red mulberry, and white mulberry. The tree known as red mulberry is not quite as common in our area. The white mulberry is native to Asia, and was brought here in a failed attempt to produce domestic silk. Silkworms feed and spin on mulberry leaves. It has grown like a weed here, as many suburban homeowners have learned. Fortunately the berries are quite good.

Mulberry trees have leaves with an oval or lobed shape, sometimes with both shapes on the same tree. Small elongated fuzzy flowers in early spring are replaced with what looks like an elongated blackberry in late spring. The berries are just ripening now in this area. Now, a word of caution. White mulberries will sometimes be white, pink, red or almost black when ripe, but all of them are still referred to as white mulberries. This can be confusing and should be considered when harvesting because unripe mulberries will make you quite ill, but are not known to be deadly. It is because of this that I usually stick to the darker variety. A good way to be sure though is to harvest them by laying a sheet on the ground under the tree and giving a good shake. Only the ripe berries should fall.

Until last year, I had never heard of green garlic. I was certainly familiar with regular old garlic, it was ever-present in my childhood kitchen, but I generally didn't give much thought to the younger, spring version of that familiar, stinky bulb until it started appearing all over the media. It (along with ramps) was the springtime darling. I actually missed out on it last year because the large Headhouse Square Farmers' Market didn't open until the beginning of July and the smaller markets I frequent didn't carry it, but I was intrigued by it.

But this year, there was an abundance of green garlic, in all of its purple, white and green glory. The first weekend of the market I picked a bunch up (even though I didn't really know what to do with it) and brought it home. That week I chopped up several of the bulbs and their leggy greens and sauteed them with onions and sausage for a quick pasta topper. I've used it in place of regular garlic in lots of things and have also tossed thin slices with some early tomatoes, salt and olive oil for a tasty salad (eat it with toasted pain au levain). I'm enchanted by the idea of making pesto with them like Sarah Gilbert has done.

How do you use green garlic?

• Sara Perry looks at an assortment of cake and strawberry pairings. She comes up with Anarchy Cake, Almond Cake With Fresh Strawberries and Summer Cream and Old-Fashioned Strawberry Layer Cake.
  
• Reviews of the best grilling cookbooks to enter the fray this summer. The favorites are Mario Batali's Italian Grill, Grill It! Recipes, Techniques, Tools by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby and Grill Every Day, 125 Fast-Track Recipes for Weeknights at the Grill by Diane Morgan.
  
• Fish tacos, with their crispy fried fish, aren't always the lowest fat option. Here's a way to eat fish tacos without busting the calorie bank.
  
• Make easy burgers with ground pork and teriyaki sauce for a quick dinner meal.
  
• On the vegetarian front, the FoodDay staff recommend these Plump Pea Dumplings especially since fresh peas are in season right now.
  
• Check out Cooking Without Looking, a show that teaches people with vision loss or impairment how to use their remaining senses to prepare tasty meals.

I never know what I'm going to find when I click on a thumbnail in the Slashfood Flickr pool. Images that look great small don't always translate well when they get larger. Sometimes they aren't quite big enough to feature (I need something that is at least 425 pixels wide in order to be able to use it here) and frequently the colors that popped and got my attention initially just don't work in a larger size.

However, sometimes I click on a thumbnail and I am thoroughly rewarded. Today was one of those moments as I discovered this image, a plastic green basket of fresh Oregon Hood strawberries. I've been eating berries lately like they were going out of style and so have chomped my way through multiple quarts just like this. Sadly, I find strawberry season to be bittersweet, because for as wonderful as the berries are, with each bite I think briefly about when they disappear from the markets.

Fresh papayas are in season, and I keep finding myself in the grocery store, picking up various specimens and thinking "what are the chances I could eat all this before it went bad?"

I used to not like fresh papaya. I found them sickly sweet, tasting of cheap perfume with undertones of dirt. But that was before I learned to toss the fresh cubed fruit in copious amounts of lemon or lime juice, to cut the sweetness and bring out the intense floral notes. Cubes of coral-colored papaya make a beautiful addition to fruit salad (and they're a heck of a lot easier to cut than mango!); they're also terrific in smoothies or in sweet-tart salsa, served over salmon or Mahi-Mahi. But my favorite use is probably papaya sorbet. This Martha Stewart recipe, with lime juice and honey, is healthy enough to eat for breakfast. I bet it would be absolutely amazing in a parfait with granola and creamy, tart yogurt gelato.

As a child, I never enjoyed eating peas. I associated them with split pea soup which I almost always found to be a nauseatingly mushy green mess. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I recently tried pea salad with radishes and feta cheese. The peas were vibrant green and had the perfect texture, not too soft or too hard. The peas were bursting with flavor.

Currently, peas are in season. Restaurants all over Manhattan have peas somewhere on the menu. Here are 8 heavenly recipes involving peas:

1. Ham and Pea Pasta
2. Fresh Pea, Baby Potato, and Sweet Onion Soup
3. Chicken with Sugar Snap Peas & Spring Herbs
4. Pea and lettuce puree with tarragon
5. Pea and Mint Couscous
6. Pea tendrils with crimini mushrooms and leeks
7. Curried Tuna Salad with Snow Peas and Avocado
8. Sugar Snap Peas With Lemon and Toasted Almonds

These late spring weeks mean lots and lots of fresh, young greens at the Farmers' Markets and in CSA shares. Wandering my local market yesterday, the tables were bursting with the vivid colors of arugula, tender spinach leaves and lots and lots of salad mixes. One of the things I love about this bounty of greens is the knowledge that they are super fresh and very close to the soil from which they came.

Recently, as I was washing a batch of soft baby lettuces, I found a tiny, curled up pill bug. A bowl of arugula yielded the blade of grass you see above (it was actually one of five long, grassy bits I found in that bag). If I had found grass in the soulless bags of spring mix I sometimes buy from the supermarket, I would have been irritated, thinking it meant that their cleanliness standards weren't up to snuff. In this situation, instead of being annoyed, I was instantly charmed, because I could imagine the earth, water and sun that had worked together to produce those greens.

How are your spring greens treating you?

When I was growing up, we ate a whole world of vegetables. Artichokes, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, onions, potatoes, cabbage, string beans, beets, spinach, squash and mushrooms regularly crossed our plates. Because of this early initiation into the world of veggies, when I moved out into the world on my own, I cooked for myself happily and with great variety.

However, as I started shopping at Farmers' Markets and local produce stands, I discovered that for as many vegetables that were old friends, there were still just as many I had yet to explore. So I made a point of trying out new veggies, trying not to be turned off simply because things were unfamiliar (my grandmother Bunny would have been so proud).

Earlier this week, I decided to take on the fava bean. Favas first entered my awareness when I was nine, because that was the year that Silence of the Lambs came out and even though I didn't see the movie until years later, it was hard to avoid the infamous line in that movie that includes a reference to fava beans. I'd seen the beans, in their huge, fuzzy pods, at my local produce market for the last couple of springs, but I'd never purchased them, mostly because I had no idea what to do with them. But on Monday, I decided to be brave and bought two pounds.

I am fascinated by this strawberry, not simply because it is a particularly lovely example of this fruit, but mostly because it was grown Corey's (thanks for adding your picture to the pool!) indoor apartment garden. One of the things I struggle with is the fact that I have no outdoor space and have to satisfy my gardening urges with a few pots by my dining room window. I have a fairly healthy bay tree and a spindly rosemary plant. I think I'll have to give indoor strawberries a shot, judging from the success pictured here.

Nothing signifies late spring/early summer better for me than to see a bartender muddling mint for a cocktail. The light, clean flavors of mint bring a certain delicacy and refreshing quality to a drink, whether it be in the iconic Mint Julep, the omnipresent Mojito or any number of classic or new creations. On a hot summer day, nothing beats a cocktail elevated with the crisp flavor of mint.

Given its fragility, mint is an easy herb to abuse. I've been to a number of bars and home parties where the bartender or host absolutely punish the mint, leaving a bitter, limp cocktail that loses all its intended charm. Truth be told, a great Julep or Mojito is harder than you'd think. Personally, I struggled for a long time with mint cocktails, simply because, like most people, I didn't understand what I was dealing with.

I'm very picky about my Popsicles (always capitalize it, it's a brand name). There are flavors I love and flavors I hate, and it bugs me when I have to buy a box of mixed flavors and there's also a flavor in there I don't particularly care for. My favorites are grape and orange, and I can do without cherry, thank you, but those are the three flavors you get in a typical box. If someone at Popsicle could make a box filled with nothing buy grape and orange, I would appreciate it.

Today is National Grape Popsicle Day. Not sure what type of recipes I could list here, except this one: grab a grape Popsicle, take off the reader, and then eat it. If you know of any other recipes, let us know in the comments below.

(Oh, and if you try to eat an orange Popsicle or root beer or even a Fudgsicle, the frozen treats police will be at your door, so be careful.)

Our foraging friend Neil Goldstein is back on the trail of wild, fresh edibles. See how he fared this week.


This week we were off to The Great Vly Swamp, which straddles the
Ulster-Greene County border near West Camp, New York. I have to mention
that Alec filled in for Amy this week on the camera, and I think did a fine
job for his first time!

So, what is in the swamp in late-May? Cattails! Specifically, the stalks,
or *hearts*. The Cattail has been referred to as the supermarket of the
swamp, as it offers us so many different things. Cattail sprouts, Flour
from Cattail roots, Cattail hearts, Cattail-on-the-cob (more on that in a
few weeks), and Cattail pollen.